Salvage Operations
by Gauss
Summary: DEBS Sequel to Old Habits Die Hard. You didn't think that Ronnie was just gonna let 'em get away with it, did you?
1. So Much for Disappearing

**Disclaimer:** I don't own any of this, except for the stuff that's mine. The rest is the property of Sony Pictures, and the brainchild of Angela Robinson.

**Further Disclaimer:** This story is the sequel to my previous story, _Old Habits Die hard_ while it's not vital to the understanding of this story that you read that one, it's probably not a bad idea to have read both of them.

* * *

**Chapter one:**

My eyes fluttered opened and my hand automatically reached over to Amy's side of the bed, gently tracing the indent her head had made in the pillow next to mine. It was still warm. She hadn't been up long. I leaned a little forward, letting the Amy-smell fill my nostrils. The sun was just streaming in through the sheer curtains of our bedroom. I didn't want to roll over to look at the alarm clock, but it was probably around eight-ish in the morning.

"Sit still, will you?" I looked groggily down at the foot of the bed where Amy sat, a single bedsheet wrapped around her, and a sketch book balancing on her knee. She sat in a little square of sunlight, a charcoal pencil balanced loosely in her blackened fingers. The white sheet she wore, and her pale skin (along with, let's be honest, my tired, bleary eyes) made her look positively radiant.

"You've finished art school, sweetie," I muttered sleepily, "you don't need to fill up a sketch book every week."

"I gotta stay sharp somehow," Amy quickly rubbed the paper with the tip of her right middle finger, smudging it.

"Ah," I replied, a slight grin appearing on my face, "so you'd rather be sitting there drawing than in bed with me?"

Amy gave me a one-sided smile, "hey, I'm wanton enough to admit I love being in bed with you; but preferably when both of us are awake, rather than when you're sleeping like the dead." She put down the pencil and looked at me, "besides, you looked so beautiful sleeping, someone had to draw it."

"Beautiful?" I sat up, rubbing my eyes and running my fingers through my short, tangled, I-just-woke-up-hair. It still hadn't grown out all the way from that little episode with Ronnie, but to be honest, I kinda liked it short. "Guess they're right about that whole eye-of-the-beholder thing." I modestly adjusted the sheet over my body, almost laughing at the pointlessness of it. It's not like I was in possession of any, um, _endowments_ that Amy hadn't seen before.

Amy smiled, almost as if she was sharing my thoughts. Maybe she was. Sometimes it's hard to tell.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Eight thirty," Amy replied, her eyes dropping back to her sketch pad.

"That's way too early for either of us to be out of bed on a Saturday morning," I told her.

"I'm not tired," Amy replied idly, her attention still on the sketchbook in front of her.

"Not what I said, lover," I offered a slightly mischievous smile.

Amy looked up to meet my gaze, "what about the sailboats?" She asked as she put down her notepad and came around to sit on the edge of the bed.

I smiled as I gripped the knot in the front of the sheet she'd wrapped around herself and pulled her closer to me. "Turns out I know the owner," I replied, running my fingertips through her still-short blond hair, "I think she'll understand if I call in sick."

-x-

The sun was no longer shining through the bedroom window when I finally emerged from the bedroom. It had long-since drifted past the top edge of the window, and now only projected a thin shaft of light onto the floor right next to the wall.

I pulled my robe around me, carefully tying the sash. Wearing nothing but a terrycloth robe around the house is one of the most underrated pleasures of the universe.

I stopped at the doorway for a moment and looked back into the room. Maybe there was something to this whole beautiful-when-she's-asleep thing. Her tangled hair lay splayed out on the pillow, and the thin satin sheets clung tightly to her lithe figure as she lay curled up on her right side. I smiled as I watched her, right after terrycloth robes, or maybe just before them, was spending the entire day in bed with someone you loved. John and Yoko were onto something.

I could almost hear Scud's voice in the back of my head: _you sure can pick 'em,_ he'd said while he was still trying to convince me not to go see her that first night, _perfect spy; straight; on the rebound from her last relationship; a member of an organization dedicated to putting you in jail; and oh yeah, she was trying to shoot you less than an hour ago._ He'd looked at me intensely at that point, _out of curiosity, in how many different languages does this have to have "disaster" written all over it before you'll actually be able to understand it?_

I watched for a moment, mesmerized by the gentle, almost imperceptible rise and fall of her chest. If this had "disaster" written all over it, give me tragedies every day. I winced as I actually realized what I was thinking. Some criminal mastermind I was. _Mass-murdering psychopath finds love and turns into hopeless mush-ball_, I thought. Sounded like the kind of headline you'd find in the National Enquirer. I smiled wryly. _How the mighty have fallen_.

I silently backed out of the bedroom and stalked over to the tiny kitchen. I turned on one of the burners and put the kettle on the stove, letting it heat up. Amy could sleep through every alarm clock we'd ever put on the bedside, but if you started up a pot of coffee, she would be awake and at your side by the time you had spooned out the coffee grounds.

I looked out the window, gazing at the glass-like surface of the Mediterranean and smiled. The tiny village of Campi Salentina, Italy was the perfect place to disappear. Or more precisely, it was the perfect place for _us_ to disappear. In the heel of the boot, it was primo Mafia territory. I hadn't had a huge amount of contact with the Mafia during my Criminal Mastermind days; and what contact I _had_ had I was pretty sure wasn't in the DEBS database; but a few movers and shakers in _la familia _owed me a favor or two. Frankly, I think they were just happy that I was getting out of their competition pool, and were eager to help with my _retirement_.

'Course, it wasn't a coincidence that the _Star of Antarctica_, in spite of its name, was actually cut and crafted in Italy. The mob hadn't been pleased when the diamond was sold and sent on tour; and an "unofficial" reward was up for anyone who returned the diamond to Italy. I'd nixed the reward in return for a safe haven. It had been a worthwhile trade on both sides. They lost one of their major competitors, they got the diamond, and we got a place to stay. Plus, since we were going to be here for a long time, I figured cultivating a little good will with the local Mafia was probably a good idea.

I lifted the coffee press out of the cabinet under the kitchen counter and started pouring coffee grounds into it. I'd turned into _such_ a coffee snob while I was here in Italy. I guess if you're gonna be a coffee snob, Italy's the place to turn into one. I'd given up on your standard drip coffee maker, coffee press was the only way to go for me. I guess I'd picked up a few quirks in my old age.

I felt a thin arm snake its way around my abdomen.

"Hey," I said as I twisted around in her embrace, "I didn't hear you get up."

"Yeah, you know," Amy whispered in my ear, "it's a spy thing."

"So _that's_ your secret plan, huh? Seduce a criminal mastermind and talk her into retirement?" I grinned. "'Cause if that's the DEBS master plan, I gotta say that you're gonna run short of spies in short order."

Amy mirrored my grin, "well, let's just say that this wasn't exactly by the book. Besides which, I think _you_ were the one doing the seducing."

"That's debatable," I replied. "That sweet, innocent 'I'm totally not up for dying today' routine? I can't think of any lesbian criminal mastermind that wouldn't have worked on."

Amy frowned, "and you know a lot of lesbian criminal masterminds, do you?"

"A handful," Amy looked at me and I reformulated, "a few," her frown deepened, "okay, one," I admitted, "but my point still stands," I insisted.

"I'm just understanding why you keep losing at poker; you can't bluff to save your life," Amy told me.

I grinned, "coffee?"

Amy nodded.

I turned around and poured her a cup of coffee; I added cream and a spoonful of sugar, then turned to hand it to her.

Amy walked over to the kitchen table taking a seat. She lifted the cup to her nose, smiling as she took in its bitter aroma. "So, what's happening in the world today?"

"Your guess is as good as mine," I told her as I fixed my own cup of coffee. "I've seen about as much of the world today as you have," I said, offering a grin over my shoulder.

I opened the front door and recovered the newspaper. I admit that I only read Italian at a snail's pace, but a small article in the bottom right corner of the front page drew my attention.

Amy, of course, immediately realized that something was up. "What is it?" She asked.

I shook my head, "and I was having _such_ a good day up until now."

"What?"

I laid the newspaper on the table and pointed at the article.

The headline read _Ronald Cockburn fuoriesce dalla prigione_.

_Ronald Cockburn escapes from prison_.


	2. Acts of Faith

**Disclaimer:** I don't own any of this, except for the stuff that's mine. The rest is the property of Sony Pictures, and the brainchild of Angela Robinson.

**Chapter 2:**

Why does it seem like I spend more time dealing with criminals now than I did before I went straight — legit? I mean, right when I think I've finally got myself out of the business, they drag me back in. Usually with some amount of kicking and screaming involved.

I honestly didn't know the name of the man who sat behind the elegant mahogany desk in front of us. Well, not his real name, anyway. Kinda weird, I guess, considering how I'd probably been single-handedly responsible for his rise to the number three position in the Giacona family, in spite of him having no blood or marriage relationship to the family. They were the power in these parts, not much of anything happened in the lower half of Italy without them knowing about it.

He called himself Celso, but I didn't believe that was his name for a second. For one thing, there was always just a fraction of a second of hesitation whenever I called him by that name; as if he weren't used to answering to it. For that matter, I wasn't even completely sure that he was Italian.

But as long as he wanted to go by Celso, I guess his real name didn't matter that much.

He often served as the Giacona family's public face, and as a consequence, everything about his image radiated perfection. He was young; mid-thirties at the oldest. The smooth, unblemished skin of his face curved down under his eyes, accentuating his strong, square jaw line. Even under his immaculately pressed and cleaned black suit, you could easily see the powerful arms underneath as he rested his hands, clasped, atop his desk. His hair was perfectly parted over his right eye, and his dark, penetrating eyes speared out from under a pair of thin eyebrows. Not glaring, per se, but they had the rather chilling habit of making me feel transparent. He's cute. For a guy. I tell you, if it weren't for the whole gayness-of-me thing…

"Lucy," Celso's tone was amicable, but guarded. He spoke without even the faintest trace of an Italian accent. I have to admit that the first time I dealt with the mob, I half expected the guy I spoke to to be a Brando knockoff. What can I say? _The Godfather_ was like the first movie I ever watched with my father.

"Celso," I nodded respectfully as I took one of the two chairs in front of the desk. Amy sat in the other.

"Lucy, I was under the impression that we had an agreement," he said. It was an accusation, but you never would have been able to tell from his tone of voice. It was perfectly level.

"We did — we do," I told him, "but that agreement has become complicated."

"Complicated, how?" Celso he asked.

"The man I stole the diamond from: he's free," I told him.

"I see," he said simply. Lemme just digress for a second to say you should never, ever play poker with Celso. His perfectly-chiseled face is impossible to read. "And you believe he is coming here?"

"I believe that he will try to find me," I replied. "I believe he will search Spain for us, but since we clearly aren't there, he'll have no leads," I looked up to meet his eyes, "except for you. He knows of my connection with you, and he knows me well enough to know I might come to you to help me disappear."

Celso nodded slowly. "And you want to know if this is information I will be willing to provide to this man."

I nodded. "He will be willing to pay for it. Handsomely," I told him. "Almost certainly a sum which I will be unable to match." There wasn't any need to elaborate. Celso probably knew our financial situation better than I did. We weren't hurting, but clearly there was no way we could match a bribe that Ronnie would probably be willing to put up for us. Yep, now was time to turn in one of those markers I'd earned for bringing that diamond to him. He still owed me a couple of favors, it was time to see exactly how much they were worth.

"And you want to know if that information is for sale," Celso said.

"I want to know if I should sell the house and buy some plane tickets," I replied. I tried to keep my voice level, but it was hard. Here, we'd finally found ourselves a place where we could just disappear forever, and now there was the real chance that we were about to lose it.

"And if you were to leave, what would you do?" Celso asked.

I shrugged. "I guess I'd probably have to go back into business for myself," I told him. "I imagine with Amy along with me we could manage pretty well. We got you that diamond, didn't we?"

Beside me, I felt, rather than saw, Amy tense up. Pretty impressive, considering that she was sitting a good three feet away from me. She probably liked the idea of me going back to a life of crime even less than I liked the idea of dragging her into it with me.

Celso raised his hands to clasp them just under his nose; his elbows still resting on the table. His thumb traced over his thin lips as he gazed down at the desk in front of him, his expression one of intense thought.

Finally, he spoke: "The Family," you could almost hear him capitalize the word, "has no interest in competing against you in any future business ventures," he continued, "I am confident that a cost-benefit analysis will show that the long-term cost of competing with you will far exceed the short-term profit of any sum he could offer."

I let out a breath I wasn't even aware I'd been holding. "Thank you," I told him as I stood from the comfortable chair. Beside me, I saw Amy stand as well.

As I was about to turn around, he spoke again, "Lucy, I would like to speak with you alone, if I may."

Amy quickly glanced over at me. I nodded quickly at her and mouthed _it's okay_.

Sensing her apprehension, Celso spoke up: "this will only take a moment," he reassured her.

"It's okay," I told her, "I'll be out in a minute."

Amy didn't look happy about it, and I winced at the hurt expression on her face, but I think she probably understood that we didn't have a huge amount of choice in the matter.

I heard Amy's footsteps all walk evenly all the way to the doorway, then the loud _click_ as the heavy oak door of his office closed and latched itself.

Celso stood and walked around the desk, it was eerie what happened when he took off his "mafia costume." It wasn't anything he wore, but there was a rather spooky difference between the man he was when he was acting on behalf of the Giacona family, and the man he was when he was just Celso.

"What's your plan?" He asked, bluntly.

"At the moment, I'm still hoping that I don't need one," I replied. "If all of his leads dry up, then it's over."

Celso tilted his head slightly, "Lucy, you don't believe that any more than I do."

"No, I don't," I admitted after a long pause.

"He's never going to stop," he added gently, "not until he's dead, or you are; both of you." He gestured at the door through which Amy had just disappeared. "He can bring a small army to bear on you, and he has the resources to pay them a lifetime's worth of cold, hard cash until he finds you. That kind of money buys some strong loyalties. You're just lucky that it won't buy mine."

"I know," I told him, offering a warm smile, "why do you think I came here?"

"And there are only two of you," he added finally. "And you have nothing to bargain with."

"I know all that," I told him. "I just don't know what to do about it."

"For one thing, you need to be armed and ready to go at a moment's notice," he started. "Second, you need to find something he wants more than you. Third, you need to find a way of giving it to him without getting yourself killed. And fourth, you need help."

"I'm guessing that's not you," I said wryly.

He shook his head. "The Family will not get involved unless there is a direct threat to their people or assets."

"I probably can't afford the mob's help anyway," I muttered.

"What about the DEB?" He asked, nodding at the door again.

"What about her?"

"Well, if you separate, go your separate ways, spread yourselves out, you have a chance. A lot better chance than you do if you're together, at any rate." He shrugged, "if nothing else, you'll probably take the heat off her… or Ronnie will grab her to smoke you out. It could go either way." He paused, looking intensely into my eyes, "I guess what I'm asking is: what does she mean to you?"

"What?"

"How far are you willing to go? You love her, it doesn't take a genius to spot that, but if you let her go, you're giving her a shot. So I need to know, right here and right now what makes her worth risking both of your lives for," he said. His tone was gentle, but his eyes bored into me, as if he could read my soul.

I closed my eyes for a moment, taking a few calming breaths. "She reminds me what my life was like, before _this_ was my life." I gestured around his office.

He nodded slowly. "Then you go all the way," he said firmly, "no matter the cost. And when it's over, you never look back. I've known you for a long time, Lucy, this life was never for you. You were good, maybe one of the best; but this was never your life."

He walked back behind his desk and slid one of the drawers opened. "Here," he said, "I have a feeling you're going to need these." He put a pair of handguns, Walther P99s, on the top of his desk.

I guess you have to be in this line of work to realize that the definition of the phrase "act of faith" is handing someone a deadly weapon.

I worked the action of one of the two pistols, hearing a single round slide into the chamber. Now _that's_ the definition of an act of faith. It was even loaded. The P99 was a solid handgun; polymer casing, smooth double-action, it looked like the law-enforcement issue model; with the 16-round magazine. I didn't want to ask how he'd got his hands on a pair of them.

I slid the pistol into my inside jacket pocket. I hoped my aim was still sharp. I was a little out of practice. The other I held in my hand. That was Amy's

With a nod, I slowly backed away.

"Lucy," he called as I reached for the doorknob. I turned back to face him. "This is as far as I'm willing to go here. Unless the Family's assets are directly threatened, I can't go any further with this."

I nodded, "I understand." Even Celso's loyalty had its limits.

-x-

"This isn't a good sign, is it?" Amy said as I held the pistol butt-first to her.

"Let's just say that we should probably get some target practice," I said.

"So… what just happened?" Amy asked.

"I just bought us a little breathing room, but not much. A couple of weeks, maybe. Enough time to plan our next move, anyway."

"Do we have a next move?" Amy asked.

"We'd better, because sooner or later, Ronnie's gonna figure out where we are, and when he does, he's going to make sure his gun isn't loaded with blanks," I muttered through gritted teeth.

"So we send him back to jail. Sick the DEBS on him." Amy said. "I still have a _little_ pull there."

I shook my head, "he'll just break out again. It'll never end."

"So, what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that when the dust settles, either him, me or both of us are gonna be dead."


	3. How Far

**Disclaimer:** I don't own any of this, except for the stuff that's mine. The rest is the property of Sony Pictures, and the brainchild of Angela Robinson.

* * *

**Chapter 3:**

"You're really scared about this one, aren't you?" Amy said from behind me as the slide to the Walther P99 in my hands locked back, indicating a dry magazine. I tapped the button next to me, bringing the paper target back towards me. As the target approached, I ejected the clip.

I frowned as I looked at the thin paper target. Dammit. The sixteen rounds were clustered nicely around the center of the black outline's chest, but not nearly as tightly as I would've liked. If the range had been much greater, I would've missed the target completely. I was rusty.

"Yeah, I am," I said as I pulled the target down. I hadn't spent this much time at a shooting range since we'd left the states for the second time. "I blew it, Amy. I knew that there was a chance that he'd break out, a pretty good one; and I let the cops handle him anyway. Now we're right in the middle of it, and I have no idea how we're going to deal with it." I replaced the target with a clean one and pressed the button next to me again. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Amy take a stance at the stall next to mine.

"Maybe he won't even find us," Amy said, "I mean, you said that he was probably going to look for us in Spain." She gestured around the room. "This isn't Spain."

"You're completely underestimating Ronnie here," I said. "If he has to, he'll check every population center on Earth one at a time to find us. Sure, it'll take him a while, but he'll find us sooner or later. He'll keep searching until he dies of old age, if it comes to that; but frankly, I'm not counting on it taking that long. Sooner or later, he'll break the right kneecap, call in the right favor, or find the right bait, and he'll have us."

"Has he gone to Spain yet?"

I shook my head, "nope. Celso hasn't heard from him, and I guarantee, he's the first phone call Ronnie would make if he didn't find us in Spain."

"So what's he waiting for?" Amy asked.

"I don't know," I said. "He wants to find me, he has the resources to find me, and he has absolutely nothing to gain by staying in the States," I replied, "the longer he stays Stateside, the more likely it is that the DEBS, the CIA, the NSA or the FBI will zero in on him."

"Maybe it's not us he's after," Amy suggested as she fired a few shots of her own.

"There's nobody else. People who cross Ronnie generally don't live long. As far as I know, you and I hold the standing record," I told her wryly. That was actually a pretty loaded statement. So far we'd only made it to six months.

With the thick soundproof ear protectors I wore over my ears, I felt; more than I heard or saw; Amy stop shooting to my right.

"What is it?" I asked immediately, raising my voice so that she could hear me. I safed my gun and laid it on the counter in front of me before I poked my head around to see what was up.

Amy pulled her earphones off. "There _is_ someone else he wants."

I frowned, "he won't go after the DEBS," I reassured her. "He only goes after cops that really screw him over. The DEBS don't qualify."

Amy shook her head, "one DEB does."

-x-

"Ms. Petrie," I muttered for the hundredth time since we'd left the firing range. I pushed the door to our tiny house open. "Christ, he's going for the top, isn't he?" I gotta admit that Amy was right. Girl's getting too good at understanding criminals. She picked up on that one before I did. Max and her cronies, Ronnie wouldn't bother with them; but Ms. Petrie? _That_ was someone he'd be willing to risk jailtime to get his hands on. At any rate, it was the only explanation that made any sense.

"So what are we gonna do about it?" Amy asked.

I turned towards the refrigerator, pulling it opened so that Amy couldn't see my expression. "Us? Nothing. The DEBS can handle this one," I told her, mustering as much confidence as I could and forcefully injecting it into my voice.

Amy wasn't fooled. That's the problem, I guess, with having a girlfriend who can read your mind. "You really think that they can handle Ronnie?" She asked with the faintest note of suspicion.

"Of course I do," I replied.

"Lucy," Amy said slowly. That note of suspicion was no longer faint. "Turn around and tell me that. Look me in the eyes and tell me that the DEBS can handle him."

I slammed the refrigerator door shut and spun around with a long-suffering sigh. "Do I need to remind you that this is the woman who tried to arrest me at least three times, would've had me shot at Endgame if I'd given her half the chance and damn near tore _us_ apart before we'd even really had a chance to be an _us_?"

"Can the DEBS handle this?" She asked for a third time.

I shook my head, "I don't know, maybe. If they're good, and if they're well trained, and if they're lucky; yeah, maybe they can handle it."

"But you can," Amy added.

I shrugged, "probably."

"I'll take your 'probably' over their 'maybe' any day of the week, and twice on Mondays," Amy told me.

"Do I need to remind you that we're still wanted fugitives; wanted by an organization headed by Ms. Petrie herself?"

"I know that, but we have to help her," Amy insisted.

"Why?" I asked. Amy looked at me in shock, but I continued anyway. "Seriously, that woman has damn near taken away everything that ever really mattered to me, present company included," I told her, throwing my hands up in exasperation, "so maybe you'll cut me a little slack if I ask you why we're helping her."

"Lucy…"

"This _is_ the same woman who tried to have you locked away in the Tower of Straight Virginity while lifting you up on a pedestal as their pride and joy, not to mention making me out to be some kind of psycho-kidnapper serial killer." I was ranting, I admit it. But I stand by my assessment of the situation. I didn't see myself losing a lot of sleep over threats to Ms. Petrie's welfare. I guess I still don't.

"Look, I know she's not exactly your favorite person…" Amy replied diplomatically.

"Picked up on that, did you?" I snapped.

"But," she charged through my interruption, "I'm asking you, please, to help her."

That pretty much took the wind out of my sails. I walked over to the kitchen table and slumped down in a chair. I let my head drop into my right hand and I rubbed my forehead, as if I were trying to rub away a migraine.

"How far are you willing to go?" I asked softly.

"What?"

"We can protect her, but not Stateside. We need to bring her here."

"That's no problem, I'll just call Max…"

I shook my head, "no. If Ronnie even catches the slightest hint that the DEBS are onto him, he'll shift to plan B; and that _always_ involves a large number of innocent bystanders."

"So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that we go to the States, and we bring her back to Italy."

"You're talking about kidnapping," Amy said slowly. "You're talking about kidnapping a high-ranking federal agent."

I nodded.

"You can't be serious." Amy said, "I mean, we don't even know where she is. She'd just beam down from God-knows-where."

"I know."

"I mean, _I_ don't even know where she is," Amy added.

"I never said it was gonna be easy," I told her.

"Lucy, that's the one way you can guarantee that Ronnie will find us. Smuggling a person across the ocean isn't exactly easy. He'll catch onto it."

"I know."

"And what about the DEBS?" She asked.

"What about 'em?"

"Assuming that we can find her and grab her, you don't think that they're gonna just let us keep her, do you? Hell no, they're gonna throw everything they've got at us."

I nodded slowly. "That's exactly what I'm counting on," I told her.


	4. The View From Yesterday

**Disclaimer:** I don't own any of this, except for the stuff that's mine. The rest is the property of Sony Pictures, and the brainchild of Angela Robinson.

* * *

**Chapter 4:**

The best security system in the universe is also the cheapest.

That said; it's also the hardest to maintain.

It has nothing to do with having the best cameras, or the strongest safe. It has nothing to do with lasers or tripwires or sensors.

It has nothing to do with how many guards you have paid or how smart a person you have coordinating the whole thing.

Nope, the single most effective security system is simply not to let anyone ever know where something is.

By that standard, Ms. Petrie had the single best security system I'd ever encountered. She didn't drive in to work, she simply "beamed" to the DEB academy; I was willing to bet that she had no significant staff at home, and those probably beamed in every day. Realistically, she had no real need to leave home except for her exceptionally rare appearances before her beloved DEBS.

Which meant that actually _finding_ her was gonna be hard. She could be living in a low-rent apartment, the kind of place anybody would walk by a thousand times and never notice. Nobody would even realize that the place housed one of the top secret agents in the western world.

But one thing at a time. Before we worried about finding the woman, we needed a car.

I tried not to notice Amy giving me a disapproving look while I skillfully picked the lock on the driver side door of an old Oldsmobile. I guess she likes to forget about my past proclivities about as much as I do. Watching me steal a car from the long-term parking lot near LaGuardia airport was a rather potent reminder that I didn't exactly have a clean past.

"You think she's in New York?" Amy asked, fidgeting uncomfortably.

"Nope," I said as the lock sprang open with a loud _click_. I pulled the door opened and slid into the driver's seat. Old cars were easiest to steal. The locks were easier to pick, the ignition wires were right under the dash, nice and easily accessible. Basically, they were built before anyone really worried about having their car stolen. The Olds wasn't quite as stylish as my old caddy, maybe; but I wasn't exactly looking for style; just four wheels and an engine.

Which isn't to say that I _couldn't_ have stolen a newer car if I wanted to. There's no such thing as an unstealable car; as much as Mercedes-Benz would like to have you believe otherwise. But when it came to stealing cars, I _was_ a little rusty, so I figured I'd start with something easy.

Besides, I wasn't _stealing_ it. I was _borrowing_ it. Without permission. I was planning on bringing it right back. Honest.

I stripped the ends of the ignition wires under the dash and gingerly touched them to each other. I smiled as I heard the engine turn over. Guess I wasn't as rusty as I thought I was. Maybe I should've tried for that Mercedes after all.

"So, if she's not in New York, why are _we_ in New York?" Amy asked.

"'cause the guy who's gonna help us find her is in New York," I told her.

"Couldn't you find someone in LA? She's a lot more likely to be there than here," Amy asked.

"Nope," I told her. "This guy is… special."

Amy frowned. "Like, 'special;' how, exactly?"

"Any chance you'd drop the subject if I just asked you to trust me?" I asked.

"Just answer the question," Amy ordered.

"If I did, there's no way you'd go along with it," I admitted. I held up a hand before she objected, "no, it's nothing that'll get anyone hurt or killed, it's just a little weird."

"Lucy…"

"Trust me?" I asked plaintively as we pulled out of the parking lot. "This guy has never let me down before."

"You sure about that?" Amy asked.

"So far, he's batting a thousand," I replied, "but he _is_ a little…"

"Weird, I know," Amy finished for me. She let out a long-suffering sigh. "Lucy, I _really_ hope you know what you're doing."

I gritted my teeth, "yeah, me too."

-x-

Piet lived in what was quite possibly one of the oldest sandstone buildings in lower Manhattan; and it showed its age. Decades worth of wear had wiped the numbers from the stone pillar outside the door, the hinges of the gate squealed in protest as we opened it. Long, wide cracks snaked their way up the stone steps outside the door. It was one of those buildings that nobody cared to either demolish or maintain. It was just _there_, growing a little older with every passing year. Most people hardly even noticed it, no matter how many times they walked past it.

"Your great hope is _here?_" Amy asked.

"Trust me?"

"You're _not_ making it easy," Amy muttered.

We made our way up to the third floor, which looked more dilapidated than the rest of the building, if such a thing was possible. I stopped in front of a water-stained door, only the numbers 3 and 0 were still visible printed upon it. The third number, whatever it had been, had long since faded away.

Amy glanced my way, giving me her patented _are you crazy_ look. I offered a little shrug in response.

She reached out to knock on the door. I grabbed her wrist and shook my head, holding my index finger to my lips.

Amy looked confused, but did not speak. As we stood, with me still grasping Amy's wrist, the door swung open.

Piet had lost a lot of weight since I'd last seen him. A rather impressive task, considering that he didn't have much to lose to begin with. His clothing hung loosely over his emaciated frame. His bony fingers curled around the doorknob and the skin of his face was pulled taut over his bony cheeks. His sunken eyes looked at me through a tangled mat of hair that hung down over his forehead.

He looked tired, but then, he always looked tired. His eyes were bloodshot, and his head and shoulders slumped as if a gigantic weight had been deposited there.

"Lucy," his voice grated; as if a layer of rust had formed on his vocal cords, "which makes you Amy," he added as he glanced over at her. He stepped away from the door and turned to walk towards the far end of the living room.

"He heard us out here, right?" Amy whispered at me.

"No," I told her, "he didn't."

We stepped into the living room. It seemed as if stepping across the threshold lowered the temperature about thirty degrees. Amy and I both shivered as we walked to the center of the room.

I'd been here before, so I had some idea of what to expect. Still, in the few times I'd had Piet work for me, I never quite got used to his living room.

Amy was coming in cold, and her eyes widened as she took in the room. On every wall hung hand-drawn sketches, each drawn on an identical sheet of blank paper. They were little more than scribbles, drawn hastily with a pencil. Some depicted recognizable scenes. The golden-gate bridge, the Eiffel tower, one showed the Twin Towers in mid-collapse. A few were more generic. A long barbed-wire fence in front of a farm house. Each image had a column of handwritten text in the upper-right hand corner. It was a list of short words or phrases. Anything from a single word to a short phrase.

Amy stood in the middle of the room, turning slowly around. There were hundreds of drawings, perhaps thousands. Each showing something slightly different.

Amy reached down to pick one up that lay haphazardly on the coffee table. It was clearly drawn from the point of view of someone lying prone, looking up at a bright sun. It depicted the silhouette of a man kneeling over them, a knife in his right hand poised to plunge into whoever's point of view this was. The list of words in the right hand margin read "ocean, blood, death, pain, explosion, boat, won't get far."

"What _is_ this?" She asked, the slightest note of fear entering her voice.

"You want to _really_ get freaked out, look at that one," I pointed to another one also lying on the coffee table.

It was a sketch just like all the others but it showed an opened door. Outside the door were two hastily-sketched women, one with short dark hair; the other with slightly-longer blond hair. The former held the wrist of the latter as they looked hauntingly out of the page. A small clock was centered above the doorway. In the upper-right corner, the words "Lucy, Amy, favor, DEB, dangerous" were written.

"Son of a bitch," she whispered, "it's us."

"Look at the clock in the picture," I told her.

"What about it?"

"What time does it show?"

"11:15," she told me.

"Now look at the clock over the door," I watched Amy as her eyes drifted over to the doorway behind me. They widened in shock.

"Oh-kay," she said quietly, "that's a neat trick."

"It's called remote viewing," I told her. "Russians developed it, CIA stole it. They called it the Stargate Project."

"I've heard about it, but I thought it was scrubbed. They said they couldn't make it work," Amy said.

"Yeah, and since the CIA says so, it must be true, right?" I muttered sarcastically.

"Touché," Amy admitted.

"Actually, the official story is actually true, as far as the CIA knows. Stargate produced a total of five remote viewers, including Piet here. But they were concerned that their abilities would be, um, misused," I told her. "They faked their own data. The project was scrubbed in 1995, and a few of them went into business for themselves."

"So… they trust career criminals more than the US government?" Amy said with a note of sarcasm.

I just looked at her, arching my eyebrows.

After a moment, Amy nodded agreeably, "okay, I guess that _does_ make sense." She turned to look at me. "So this is your plan; get a two-bit tea-leaf reader to zero in on Ms. Petrie? Do you have the faintest idea how insane that sounds?" She winced as if suddenly realizing that Piet was still in the room. She turned to face him quickly, "no offence."

"None taken," Piet replied as he sunk tiredly into a chair behind a drafting table. "But for the record, I prefer the term 'two-bit charlatan,'" he added almost as an afterthought.

Amy's face reddened. She's unbelievably cute when she's embarrassed. "Sorry," she murmured.

"Amy, this is the one chance we've got. Now you have a choice, you can trust me to protect her, or you can trust the DEBS. Either way, this is the best idea I can come up with," I told her.

"That doesn't mean it's a good one," Amy replied.

"Look, if we can catch her at home, it could be days before anyone even realizes that she's missing. You said yourself that you practically never saw her until I showed up," I told her. "If we snatch her from her own home, we get at least twenty-four hours before they even notice she's gone; at least 36 before they even think to close the airports." _It also means that we can leave a nice clear trail to follow because nobody will even be looking for us, _I didn't add.

"How do you know that Ronnie hasn't thought of this?"

"Not his style. He'll stage a massive assault on the DEBS Academy try to catch Ms. Petrie when she makes one of her rare visits." I shrugged, "I told you, he's not much of a planner."

"But what about the DEBS? I've seen what Ronnie's capable of. Can they handle him?"

"That's the beauty of it, if Ms. Petrie never shows up in the Academy, they won't have to. Ronnie's not gonna pick up a murder rap just to bust a few wannabe spies," I winced. "No offence."

"None taken," Amy replied.

"But he would if he knew that he could snatch Petrie in the process," I continued.

"Petrie?" Piet piped up again. "No deal, Reynolds," his tone of voice was harsh, "I am _not_ implicating myself in the kidnapping of a federal agent."

"There, you see?" Amy said. "Guess we have to go to doing it the old fashioned way: _looking for her_."

"Then we may as well go home," I snapped back at her, "there's no way we'll find her before Ronnie does." I turned back to Piet. "You owe me, Piet."

Piet rolled his eyes, "oh, I knew you were gonna bring that one up."

"December twenty-first, 2002," I told him, "a beautiful Sunday evening here in New York if I remember right."

Piet took a deep breath. "I do this, and we're square, right?"

"Even-Stephen," I agreed. "Next time you hear from me, I'll be a paying customer, or I'll have a _really_ good cause for you to work for."

"And nothing will trace back to me?" Piet asked.

"You have my personal guarantee that the DEBS will never shade your doorstep…" I looked at Amy, "…again."

"What happened on December twenty-first, 2002?" Amy whispered.

"Long story," I whispered back, "I'll tell you sometime." I remember telling Amy that an honour among thieves was a load of shit. Turns out that's not entirely true, at least not where Piet's concerned.

Dealing with criminals is just like dealing with any other kind of businessman, you just need to find where they're vulnerable, and shamelessly exploit it. Piet's soft spot was his personal sense of honour. He doesn't like to leave any debt unpaid.

Piet looked down at his drafting table where a blank sheet of paper lay, then he looked up at me. "Okay, Reynolds, we have a deal."


	5. Bread Crumbs

**Disclaimer:** I don't own any of this, except for the stuff that's mine. The rest is the property of Sony Pictures, and the brainchild of Angela Robinson.

**Chapter 5:**

I hated having to drag Scud back into this again; but the fact of the matter was, even if I was the brains behind the Reynolds' crime syndicate, Scud was its soul. There's simply no way I would've been able to keep the operation running if not for him. Quite above and beyond the fact that he usually played the role of my conscience, he was also responsible for the little things. Making sure I had all the equipment I needed, getting the necessary henchmen, getting me all the information I needed to run a heist; Scud was a magician when it came to the logistics of running a criminal empire. Me, I just liked stealing stuff. I guess it's just my good luck that I also happen to be really good at it.

My hands tightened on the wheel of the yellow taxi cab. There is a method to my madness, really. There was a reason why I used a taxi cab as a getaway car on any number of heists. A taxi is ubiquitous. Nobody looks at the driver with any serious scrutiny, even if they're inside the cab. Scud would get into a taxi if Amy ushered him into one, and nobody would think it was weird to see someone on the street hop into the back seat of a taxi. And it would be hours at the very least before this taxi was even noticed missing. So, believe it or not, a bright yellow sedan was actually a pretty smart car to use.

Scud was actually unusually easy to find. All a matter of knowing where to look. He'd been working freelance at the DEBS' Academy to keep himself out of jail; not that he probably wouldn't have done it anyway. Janet was there, and it gave him a good excuse to be close to her. I guess the DEBS, apart from having good taste in wardrobe, were rather pragmatic. They saw the value of hiring an ex-criminal as a consultant.

I had to admit that I grinned a little as we drove past the DEBS academy. If only the DEBS knew that their favorite whipping-girl was literally right on their doorstep…

I smiled as I watched Scud's distinctive saunter down the street. It was good to see him again. Except for the whole Ronnie fiasco, I had barely had any contact with him in the last four years; partly for my own safety, mostly for his. I guess you only really realize how important someone is once they're not around anymore.

I waited until Scud had rounded the corner before I pulled up along side him. Amy pushed the back door opened. "Get in," she ordered.

To his credit, the only outward reaction Scud had to seeing Amy again was a brief widening of his eyes. A pretty impressive feat considering he hadn't seen either of us in a long time. I probably would've been a little more shocked if I'd seen me after almost a year. He slid into the back seat without much in the way of fanfare. Scud has a way of knowing when a degree of subtlety is called for. He slid into the back seat next to Amy, and I drove off, hurriedly, but not too fast. The last thing I needed right now was to get a speeding ticket. That would put an end to this heist right quickly.

I pulled into a back alleyway and stopped the car. I turned around to face Scud. "Okay, Scud, don't freak out now."

For the record, never, _ever_ ask Scud not to freak out.

"What the _hell_ are you doing here?" He demanded.

See what I mean?

"Okay, Scud, you need to calm down a little," I said gently.

"No, you go away for four years, I barely hear from you, now you show up in a cab," he looked up at the license displayed on the front dash, "belonging to a guy named Vinny. I think I've earned a little freaking out here." He turned to Amy, "you're looking nice," he said in a level tone of voice.

"Thanks," Amy said, "how's Janet?"

"She's fine," Scud said. He turned back to me, his tone sharpening again, "what are you guys doing here?" He demanded again. "I don't know if you know this but Ronnie's out of jail, and you guys aren't exactly his favorite people," Scud pointed out.

"Why do you think we're here in the first place?" I asked. "Look, I need you to find a few things for me." I passed a list over the back seat to him. "How soon?"

Scud scanned the list, "none of this is hard to get. Say, 24 hours?" Just for the record, the fastest way to get Ronnie to _stop_ freaking out is to make him shift gears into business mode.

"Good, stash it in the usual place," I told him.

"Lucy, what do you need all this for?" He asked.

"I can't tell you," I replied.

"Lucy…" Scud started.

"No, listen, the less you know, the better. That way, if anybody asks, you don't have to lie," I told him.

Scud's eyes narrowed as he looked into mine. "Is anybody gonna ask?"

I took a deep breath, "yes," I told him simply. "In about three days, maybe less. And I know you well enough to know that you'd lie to protect me in a cold minute. Don't."

"What?"

"_When_ they ask, I want you to tell them everything you know. Everything. I want you to hand them that list I just gave you. I want them to know everything down to what seats we're occupying on our flight to Italy."

"Lucy, what are you into?"

I closed my eyes, "you'll find out in a few days," I told him. "I know I'm putting you in a bad position."

"The DEBS and I have a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy," Scud said tightly. "I have to answer any question they ask as completely as possible, but they agree not to hold me responsible for anything they _don't_ ask. I think Max had something to do with that deal."

"How about Janet?" Amy asked.

"She'll understand, I hope," Scud replied. He took a deep breath. "Okay, Lucy, you've got your three days." He gestured at the piece of paper in his hand, "I'll have this for you by this time tomorrow."

"Thanks," I said softly. "Now get out of here before the DEBS start to wonder where you are." I nodded at the passenger side door.

Amy and I sat in silence for a moment after Scud left. I slumped a little lower in the driver's seat as I let the tension bleed out of my body.

"Lucy," Amy started gently, "what are you doing?"

I closed my eyes, taking a series of deep breaths. "Laying down bread crumbs, Gretel."

-x-

Ms. Petrie's house was, to be sure, no run-down apartment. I really should've known. I mean, there's really no way that she would let her beloved DEBS stay in a nicer house than hers. It wasn't exactly a mansion, but it was definitely larger than a single woman, living alone, really needed.

Scud had been true to his word. He'd got everything we needed, down to the customs forms with forged signatures, and the car we were driving; plus a few select tools to get past Ms. Petrie's security system.

I looked down at the drawing in my hand. Admittedly, it wasn't anything on par with Amy's handiwork, but she had the decided advantage that she usually had her subject sitting right in front of her. I looked back up at the house. Yep, this was the place all right.

It was located in a small suburb of San Marino, where relatively large houses were pretty common. It was no more spectacular than any other house on the block.

Actually, it pretty much blended in perfectly with its surroundings.

"Okay," Amy whispered while sitting next to me, "are we sure this is the place?"

I stepped out of the car and looked at the house quizzically for a moment. Then I knelt down and picked up a small stone from the walkway and hurled it at the house.

The two of us watched as a barrier which had until that moment been invisible sprang into existence. A translucent wall of criss-crossing blue, white and yellow lines leapt up from the ground, curving over the large house in a perfect dome shape. The pebble I'd thrown clattered to the ground outside the barrier.

"This is the place," I said. I frowned as the barrier slowly faded from view, "what is it with the DEBS obsession with plaid? I mean, I get the whole plaid skirt thing. You need to hold up the whole cover as a girls' school, but a plaid force field?"

Amy shrugged, "I don't know, honestly. I never asked."

I took a deep breath. "Okay, Amy, this is the last chance to back out. In two hours, we'll both be wanted fugitives." I frowned. "Well, wanted_er_ fugitives," I corrected myself. "When you see that barrier go down, I want you to pull the car up to the front door."

"Yeah, I was meaning to mention that," Amy said, "I'm not exactly keen on the idea of driving a hearse around LA."

I smiled. "Relax, love. There's a method to my madness."

"You sure you can make it past security?"

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. The fact of the matter was, this whole thing depended on my _not_ beating security, but looking like I was trying to; which, believe it or not, is actually harder than simply beating the security system. If my guess was right, then she probably had security cameras recording from every square foot of the house, but nobody watching them in real time. If they were, there was a chance that they'd recognize the house, or a scene out the window and figure out where she was living. Her entire security depended upon nobody knowing where she was. So, nobody would see the security footage until they figured out that she was missing.

"But just to be sure," I added, "be ready to beat a hasty retreat if something goes wrong."

I _have_ been known to be wrong on things like this before.


	6. Amateurish Job

**Disclaimer:** I don't own any of this, except for the stuff that's mine. The rest is the property of Sony Pictures, and the brainchild of Angela Robinson.

**Chapter 6:**

This was my first kidnapping, and I was already doing an amateurish job. For the record, kidnapping Amy doesn't count. I was a thief, but kidnapping was just beneath me. Some people find that strange, and frankly, I have to admit that's not exactly an untenable position to hold. You'd think that if you're a half-decent thief, then kidnapping should be a breeze, right? I mean, it's still stealing, you just happen to be stealing a human being. And usually, the security is low around a human being, unless they've locked themselves in a castle of some description. You'd think that it'd be relatively easy, right? You'd think, and you'd be wrong.

For one thing, sneaking a diamond through customs is a _lot_ easier than sneaking a living breathing human being; one, in particular, who will scream bloody murder at her first opportunity. A human being isn't exactly something you can fence in most cases. And the cases where you can; well, I'd once worked with someone who sold teenaged girls to the highest bidder, but for the record, I didn't know it at the time, I never worked with them again, and he ended up getting a death sentence in a prison in Singapore for drug trafficking. I might have helped that process along a little. As a career criminal who was thought to be a mass-murderer, I wasn't a big fan of the death penalty, but there are some cases where I make exceptions.

Hey, even a career criminal needs to draw the line somewhere.

All that said, I'd be lying if I told you that I'd never entertained the idea of striking Ms. Petrie directly. I'd be lying even more if I told you that I never actually started planning such a strike. It was a sort of contingency plan in case the DEBS got a little too close for comfort, but it never got past the planning stages.

Honest.

And honestly, the plan had never been to kidnap Ms. Petrie herself. It's often more valuable to have an enemy at large, but scared, than to have her dead or off the street. That's part of the reason why I try to avoid killing anyone unless I absolutely have to. Dead people aren't very useful. Ms. Petrie is one of those people who's more useful scared than dead.

So, no, the plan had never been to actually kidnap or harm Ms. Petrie. It would probably have been enough for her to know I'd been there, in her house, no more than twenty feet from where she slept. Ms. Petrie's a lot of things, but dumb isn't one of them. She'd have got the message: "I can get you any time I want to, so back off, bitch." Not that I necessarily _would_, mind you. She just had to believe that I was _willing_ to, and since she was already convinced that I was some kind of mass-murdering sociopath, that probably wouldn't have been a hard product to sell.

That was the practical reason. The professional reason why I'd never kidnapped anyone was that, frankly, I consider kidnappers to be somewhere around pond scum on the scale of criminal masterminds.

And again, I remind you, "kidnapping" Amy doesn't count.

I mean, it's one thing to reallocate someone's belongings to yourself. I mean, every time I stole something it was from someone who could either afford to lose it, or who had insurance to cover it. Taking a human being and terrorizing their family and loved ones into doing… whatever, that's just low.

Yeah, I know, it's a weird place for me to draw a moral line. Kidnapping, a real kidnapping, was just beneath me.

Or at least it had been a week ago.

With that in mind, I checked the clip in the Walther I had on my hip. Fully loaded. I slid the clip into the butt of the pistol and smoothly slid the bolt back, chambering the first round.

"Lucy," Amy's voice gently invaded my train of thought, effortlessly derailing it. "What happened to your 'no guns' rule?" She asked, the slightest note of accusation dancing around her voice.

Amy had a point. I never carried a gun on most heists. I like a little artistry in most of my thefts. If everything went according to plan, I wouldn't need it, but I wasn't exactly sure how likely it was that everything would go according to plan.

"Just how likely do you think it is that she's gonna go quietly?" I hissed back at her. "The only way I'm getting her out of that house is if she thinks that there's a real chance I could kill her, and I think you probably know that."

"And what if she gets her hands on it, huh?" Amy asked. "She was a DEB before she was the director. I think she _probably_ remembers a thing or two."

"All the more reason why I should have a gun," I muttered under my breath. Amy heard me and shot me a nasty look. I let out a long, exasperated breath. "Amy, I have no idea what I'm going to find when I get in there. For all I know, there could be a team of DEBS in there the minute I set foot on the floor. I'm sorry, the gun stays," I told her.

Amy set her jaw, knowing that there was a certain logic to the comment. I didn't think anybody other than us knew where Ms. Petrie was hanging her hat, but if I was wrong, and I went in there unarmed, I wouldn't last ten seconds, and Amy knew that.

"Will you at least promise me that you won't use it unless you absolutely have to?" She asked.

I slid the gun back into the waistband of my pants and looked back at the blonde. "Deal," I said finally, "but the second _anybody_ reaches for a gun, so do I, you understand?"

"Lucy…"

"And again, I remind you that this is the same woman who tried to take away everything that really mattered to me, present company included," I told her. "Not to mention that she could potentially have herself surrounded by dozens of plaid-skirted vixens who would like nothing better than to punch a bunch of nine-millimeter holes in my body. You'll excuse me if I'm not willing to trust my life to her good graces."

"I'm not asking you to trust her, just don't let yourself get carried away," Amy said.

"I do _not_ _—_," I started.

"Yeah, you do, sometimes," Amy said gently. "You get emotional, you make a snap decision, and, sometimes…" She let the statement trail off with a shrug. "You said it yourself, Petrie's taken a lot from you, and I guess it's fair to say you have plenty of reasons to hate her."

"I don't hate —," I started.

"And I wouldn't blame you if you did," Amy charged through my interruption. "But this isn't about you, it's not about me, and it's not about her, or even what she did to you, 'cause whatever she did, she doesn't deserve whatever Ronnie's going to do to her. All I'm asking is that you remember that while you're in there."

You have no idea how much I wanted to argue the point, but the fact is that she was right. Petrie wouldn't have to give me much of an excuse to beat the living daylights out of her; and I'm _really_ not a violent person by nature. Mom died just after I was born. Dad died of cancer when I was 19, and Dad had spent most of those 19 years avoiding having none other than Petrie herself try to lock him up. Amy and Scud, they're really all I've got in the world, and Petrie had made it her mission in life to take them away, and realistically, she already had me mostly cut off from Scud. I was running short of things to lose, but Amy was right. I owed Petrie big time, but she didn't deserve whatever Ronnie had in store for her.

I looked over at Amy and smiled warmly.

Amy cocked her head slightly, her expression questioning. "What is it?"

"I just…" My voice caught a little. "I just really wish you could've met my dad. He really would've liked you."

"He knew about…" Amy gestured at me, then herself.

I nodded, and offered her a one-sided smile. "Are you kidding? I think he knew before I did. Let's just say that it wasn't Humphrey Bogart that made _Casablanca_ worth watching for me."

"Ingrid Bergman _was_ pretty hot in a 1930s kinda way," Amy admitted, a nostalgic, dreamy smile spreading across her face.

I grinned. "And your folks _didn't_ know you were starting to cross over to the Sapphic side of the street?"

"You think they did?" Amy asked.

"Well, they didn't seem _that_ surprised when they met me," I told her.

Amy cocked her head slightly. Her eyes rolled up and to the right as she searched for the distant memory. "You know, you're right," she admitted.

I smiled. "Okay, you stay here and ponder your parents' surprise at the gayness of you, or lack thereof, and I'll go see if I can get your ex-boss. When that force field drops, drive up to the front door."

Amy nodded. "Be careful," she said as I dropped onto the warm asphalt of the street.

I closed the passenger side door as quietly as I could. The black body suit I was wearing was snug, but it allowed me to move freely, and it didn't have any loose fabric that could snag a tripwire or break a laser beam.

On the other hand, it didn't leave much of me to the imagination. Most days I don't have a problem with that. This was definitely one of those days.

It had been almost five years since I'd had to make my way through a DEB force field. Apparently, they hadn't changed the design much. Not enough that it mattered anyway. I guess they never figured out how I did it the first time; or never worked out _that_ I did it the first time. Maybe they just thought that Amy let me in.

There's one major disadvantage to keeping your location a complete secret. Security outside the house is necessarily minimal. If you hang cameras outside, and have electronic eyes at every entrance, the neighbors begin to wonder what the heck's going on inside that house. A force field is invisible, unless you activate it; but I remembered that the house Amy used to live in was relatively unsecured once you got past that.

So getting _to_ the house was actually pretty easy. Easier, by far, than it had been to get to Amy's room way back when.

The easiest way to avoid being detected by a security system is to make sure that you're not wherever that security system is. Every system has a blind spot, a place where for whatever reason it's impossible, impractical or pointless to place a sensor, camera, or guard.

There was exactly one place I could guarantee that there would be no motion detector in this house: Ms. Petrie's bedroom. If they placed any kind of sensor in that room, she would invariably set it off when she rolled over in bed or got up to use the bathroom. I'd done the same thing breaking into Amy's room way back when, and it had worked then. I hoped that they hadn't worked _that_ little detail out too.

It takes talent to lay down a trail without making it look like a trap. When you deliberately leave evidence at the scene, it can't _look_ like you deliberately left evidence at the scene. It has to look like it's an oversight, a mistake. You'd be surprised how hard it is for someone who has a well-established reputation for heists planned down to the most minute detail and the millisecond to make it look like they screwed up.

Frankly, I was betting an awful lot on the premise that kidnapping Mother Superior would outweigh the DEBS' self-preservation instinct. I mean, they literally called in the marines when Amy and I had staged that little kidnapping. I can only imagine how much their plaid skirted asses would be in a sling when they realized that Petrie was missing.

I reached into a small pouch sewn into the belt I wore around my hips, and flipped opened the small electrical device. On its screen, a green wire-mesh, three-dimensional representation of the house appeared, complete with walls and rooms. I breathed a sigh of relief as I looked at the screen. Only one heat signature was being read in the entire house. That one had to be hers.

I took a moment to remind myself not to get too cocky. A thermal scan is the necessary first step to an intrusion of this type, and the DEBS weren't dumb. Masking a thermal signature is actually pretty easy to do, but it requires some rather sophisticated and expensive equipment. But masking every thermal signature, except for one, while possible, is extremely difficult. You generally don't do it unless you _know_ you're about to get hit by someone. I was counting on the DEBS not figuring that one out. But if somehow they _had_ figured this out, this could be the shortest kidnapping in the history of crime.

I had a dozen what-ifs running through my head. There was a lot that could go wrong in the next ten minutes. What if the DEBS knew about my association with Piet? What if they found out about our meeting with Scud? What if I'd already tripped a sensor I didn't even know was there? What if I was rusty after being out of the game for so long?

And there was the big one: what if the DEBS figured out where I was going before I was ready for them?

I chewed on my lower lip as I looked at the window about fifteen feet above my head. At least it was on the back side of the house. I'd hate to try to climb into one of the front windows without one of the neighbors noticing.

I'd love to be able to claim that I darted up the drainpipe like a cat, but the truth is that any drainpipe you'd find in a private residence is too weak to support even my meager 127 pounds. Not that it mattered. The nearest drainpipe was well out of reach of her window anyway.

It occurred to me that scaling the building and getting the DEBS' Mother Superior was probably something Amy was better suited for. I mean, in her heyday, she used to hang a hundred feet off the ground as a matter of routine. Me, I'm a little uneasy with heights. Not fear, per se, but just a little… not right. Amy, she could scale this wall, be in through the window, and have Petrie unconscious and out on the street without any problems, if everything went smoothly. But that would throw a huge monkey wrench into the plans. Whatever happened to me, Petrie could never have any reason to suspect that Amy had anything to do with it. So it fell to me to somehow cross the 15 vertical feet between myself and Petrie's window.

Sometimes the oldest solutions are still the best. I told Scud I needed something that could deliver a high tensile strength line up to 40 feet straight up, and anchor it in something like a wood beam, and do it as close to silently as could conceivably be achieved. There are some who would see that as a pretty tall order. Scud had duly delivered a 500-year-old solution, corrected for the twenty-first century: a hunting crossbow armed with a quiver full of custom broadhead bolts. The heads were designed to embed in just about anything softer than steel and expand within the material, anchoring it. It was equipped with a crank-cocking device that made it easy and quick for me to achieve the 225 pound pull necessary to cock the crossbow. I felt the bowstring cock back with a soft click, and engaged the safety.

I chewed on my lower lip uncomfortably. I was about to do something that pretty much went against every single instinct I had. It was an action reminiscent of the man who walks into a meeting with a grenade strapped to his own body, and believe it or not, this was actually plan "A." Usually I'm at plan "C" or "D" before I'm seriously considering something like this.

With my teeth, I pulled the glove off of my right hand and reached into the quiver to pull a single crossbow bolt free. I pressed the tips of my fingers into the aluminum shaft, making sure that I left a nice clean set of prints. My prints were still in the DEBS files, and assuming they were on their game, it would be pretty easy for them to lift all the fingerprints of my right hand from the smooth, metal shaft.

Basically, I'd just reproduced one of the classic rookie mistakes. There's a long, long list of would-be criminals who remembered to wear gloves for the heist, but forgot that they left fingerprints all over their equipment during the preparation. Shell casings, timers, wiring, tools. I once knew a thief who didn't leave a single fingerprint, saliva droplet, or hair at the scene (which, considering he was bald, sounds a lot more impressive than it is). He got nailed because he left a drill bit behind and forgot that he'd touched it will all three fingers of his right hand while he was packing everything up.

I pressed my right eye against the starlight scope mounted on top of the crossbow and swung it up to vertical. In pale green, as if it had been illuminated by daylight, I could see the overhang of the roof, and the thick wooden support beams that held it aloft.

"Here we go again," I whispered to myself as I thumbed the safety off and gently squeezed the trigger.

Scud knows his equipment, I tell you. The only sound as the crossbow discharged was analogous to a quiet sneeze followed almost immediately by a soft _thwack_ as the arrow buried itself in the hard wood, trailing a thin rope behind it. It lodged itself there and held.

I quickly glanced over at the neighbor's house, about twenty yards away. No lights came on, no pets started acting up. Not that I expected them to. I'd been standing right next to it, and I'd barely heard the crossbow fire, or the impact.

I looked up at the window over my head. No light came on. I waited a minute to make sure I hadn't alerted anyone inside. I checked the thermal scan again. She wasn't moving, and she didn't show any signs of having been woken up.

I smiled a little to myself as I fastened a pair of ascenders to the rope. In the movies, they always have some kind of electrical winch thingie to pull the hero up to the top of whatever rope they're hanging on. That didn't actually work in real life. I was climbing on good old-fashioned muscle power.

Ascending a free-hanging rope is something like imitating a caterpillar. I'm pretty sure that's where the idea came from. The top handle ties into your harness, the bottom ties into a pair of foot loops. The top handle is moved up a couple of feet, then you hang by your harness while you shift the bottom handle up to end up right underneath it. Then you use the foot loops to push the top handle up a few feet again, and repeat as necessary. Yeah, no whizzing up the ropes for this jaunt.

Nevertheless, I made it to the top window in a few minutes and stopped, hanging quietly, just under the rafters.

Thank God for small favors. The curtains were drawn, and the lights were out. That was good. I needed at least a few minutes to bypass the alarm on the window. The curtains would muffle any sound I made.

Bypassing the window's alarm system was surprisingly easy. It was a matter of drilling a small, quarter-inch hole in the center of the window, threading a pair of metal leads down to the contacts at the bottom of the window, matching the resistance, and completing the circuit.

Something was chewing at the back of my head. It really shouldn't be this easy. The alarm on the window was the kind you could pick up at any Radio Shack. Sure, it would stop a relatively unskilled or undetermined intruder, but the DEBS had no reason to believe that anyone breaking into Ms. Petrie's home would be either one.

My feet dropped silently onto the plush carpet. At the far end of the room, I could see a form laid out on the bed, her curly, short hair laid out on the pillow. It was Petrie all right. Piet, apparently, was still batting 1000.

I didn't have long. I reached into my pocket. Methoxyfluorane would knock her out long enough to get her outside, and it was relatively harmless. Five steps to the bed, with a little luck, my body weight would hold her down for the 30 seconds it took the 'fluorane to knock her out, and then, hopefully, I could find some way of getting Amy inside to help me drag her back to the car.

I wasn't going to get the chance.

I made it two steps before the soft _whip_ of a loop of cord drew me short. Before I could react, the loop dropped around my throat and pulled tight. Then strong arms pulled me backwards, helplessly flailing against the garotte.


End file.
